The newspaper gulls were faster than ships.
This was one of the Grand Line's reliable facts — the gulls that carried the world's news moved on routes and winds that no vessel could match, and the information they carried arrived in places long before the people that information concerned. By the time Crocodile's ship had cleared the Sabaody Archipelago's outermost bubble-light and found its heading, the wanted poster was already in the hands of people who would spend the following days deciding what to do about it.
Most of them decided to talk about it.
---
Somewhere in the New World, a large and enthusiastic voice was asking what race the new wanted criminal belonged to, and expressing interest in adding him to a collection. The specific nature of the collection was not elaborated upon but could be inferred.
At the entrance to the Grand Line's first half, a red-haired man held the newspaper up against the sea wind and looked at the photo with the appreciation of someone who recognized quality. His first mate noted the bounty with the detached professionalism of someone for whom five hundred million berries was a data point rather than an astronomical number. Their captain said he'd like to meet him someday, then turned his attention to the East Blue ahead and the people on his ship who were more immediately his concern.
On Fishman Island, in the middle of a banquet that the current events above the surface were making considerably more interesting, an ancient and powerful voice expressed amusement at the activity in the archipelago with the perspective of someone for whom human chaos was a very old and very consistent form of entertainment.
Somewhere in the South Blue, a different kind of reader looked at the photo with the specific attention of someone identifying a capability rather than a person, and told someone named Queen to go find him before someone else did.
---
Marine Headquarters.
Sengoku had the newspaper open on his desk. Tsuru had the same newspaper open in her hands. They had been in the same room with this information for approximately ten minutes and had not yet finished having the conversation it required.
"Six hundred and fifty million," Sengoku said. "First bounty."
"The suppressed number is higher," Tsuru said. "The Celestial Dragon's death would have justified considerably more. They chose what the narrative could support."
"I know what they chose and why." Sengoku's expression had the quality of a man managing several frustrations simultaneously and declining to voice most of them. "Garp let him walk."
"Garp minimized catastrophic civilian casualties by not fighting a Mythical Zoan to the death in a densely populated transit hub," Tsuru said, with the patience of someone who had been refining this argument since the report arrived. "The alternative was substantially worse."
Sengoku looked at the photo.
The Earth-Wind Composite Form, caught at the moment of the roar, the ghost horns and the jade-green scales and the open mouth. The photographer had found the shot at the last possible moment — the deck of a ship, the figure turning toward Garp on the dock, everything in the image carrying the quality of a moment that was already ending.
It was, he had to admit, an extraordinary photograph.
It was also going to be on every wall in every port from here to the New World for the foreseeable future, which was its own category of problem.
"Tell Garp," he said, "that the report is not optional."
"I'll tell him," Tsuru said. "He'll complain about it."
"Tell him I know."
Tsuru folded her newspaper. "This sea is going to get more complicated."
"It was already complicated."
"More so, then." She stood. "We should be prepared."
Sengoku looked at the photo a moment longer.
What did Garp say? he thought. That the punch was interesting?
He closed the newspaper.
---
In the North Blue, in the territory that the Don Quixote family had been consolidating for the past several years, Doflamingo held the paper with the loose, negligent grip of a man for whom most things were beneath his full attention.
He was not looking at the wanted poster.
He was looking at the corner of the image — a shadow at the dock's edge, barely visible, the hem of a fur coat in the frame's periphery.
Others would see a background detail.
Doflamingo saw confirmation.
"The Sand Crocodile left Alabasta," he said, to the room, to no one in particular. "And got himself involved in this." He smiled — the specific smile that contained within it an entire architecture of plans already in motion. "Convenient timing."
He set the paper down.
"If the World Government starts asking questions, his position gets complicated. And if his position gets complicated — " he spread his hands, the gesture of a man indicating an open door — "Alabasta becomes available."
He looked out the window at the sea.
"Don't rush," he said. "These things have their own schedule. Just watch."
---
On the ship, several days out from the Sabaody Archipelago, the Navy reached Crocodile by phone bug.
He listened to the questions — the witness accounts, the timing of his presence at the harbor, the corner of his coat in the photograph — with the patience of a man who had anticipated this conversation and had prepared for it not with elaborate explanations but with the simplest available defense.
"I never requested to become a Warlord," he said, when they had finished. "The title was offered because the alternative was less convenient for the World Government than the arrangement. You accepted that arrangement." A pause. "Do you have evidence of a connection between myself and the criminal Lindsay?"
The silence on the other end of the line was the silence of someone who had been handed a technically correct argument and was looking for the flaw in it and not finding one.
"If you do," Crocodile continued, "present it. If you don't, this conversation has reached its conclusion."
He hung up.
Looked at the sea for a moment.
Looked at Lindsay, who was sitting on the bow with the newspaper still in his hands, reading his own wanted poster for what appeared to be the fourth or fifth time — not with vanity, with the same quality of attention he brought to things he found genuinely interesting, which was a different thing.
The clues this man carries, Crocodile thought, need to outweigh the risks he creates.
He looked at the horizon.
Alabasta is close. Find out if he can read the Poneglyph. Then reassess.
The land appeared on the morning of the sixteenth day.
It appeared the way Alabasta always appeared from the sea — gradually, the specific quality of it arriving before the details did, a warmth in the light and a dryness in the air and a particular color to the horizon that was the color of an ancient desert kingdom doing what it had always done, which was endure.
Crocodile exhaled slowly.
He had been at sea long enough that the return to a place with sand under his feet instead of water was something his body registered before his mind did. The Sand-Sand Fruit's affinity with its element was not something he thought about often — it was simply part of him — but proximity to the desert brought it to the surface, the way a smell brought a memory, the way home brought a specific kind of attention back to the body.
The Poneglyph, he thought. Finally.
The cannonball hit the water three meters off the port bow.
The explosion sent a column of water across the deck, and Crocodile had a gravel scimitar in his hand before the water finished landing.
His first read of the situation: warship, Navy, Alabasta security force. His second read: the vessel was a small civilian fishing boat, badly maintained, with two people aboard — an old man and a boy, perhaps a grandfather and grandson by their resemblance — who were shouting something in the direction of the ship and reloading with the desperate energy of people who had committed to a course of action and were seeing it through despite the obvious power differential.
Crocodile raised the scimitar.
Lindsay was already between him and the fishing boat.
One partially transformed hand — the Earth Demon form at its minimum expression, just enough structural reinforcement to handle the task — caught the scimitar's path and stopped it without particular effort.
"Let me talk to them first," Lindsay said.
Crocodile looked at the fishing boat.
At the old man's face, which had shifted from committed aggression to the specific expression of a man who has just recognized who he fired a cannonball at and is recalculating very rapidly.
"Sand Crocodile," the old man said, his voice carrying across the water. "We — we thought — forgive us, sir, we had no idea — "
The boy beside him was more composed but equally urgent. "The neighboring country has declared war on Alabasta. The king imposed a sea ban — no unidentified vessels. We were enforcing it." He bowed, a full bow, the kind that communicated genuine distress. "We didn't know it was you, sir. Please forgive us."
Crocodile lowered the scimitar.
Held it for a moment, thinking.
Then dissolved it.
War, he thought. Alabasta is at war with a neighboring country.
He looked at the old man. At the boy. At the coast of Alabasta visible beyond them, the familiar silhouette of the kingdom he had been planning toward for years.
Something had changed while he was away.
Or something had been changed. Deliberately, perhaps. The kind of changed that created exactly the instability required for a particular kind of plan to find purchase.
He looked at Lindsay.
Lindsay was already helping the old man and the boy aboard, apparently having decided that the cannonball was adequately explained by the circumstances and bore no grudge. He was asking the boy something — the specific attentive questions of someone who wants accurate information rather than general impressions.
Crocodile watched this and thought about the shape of what he was walking back into.
War with a neighboring country.
Alabasta, destabilized.
And I have been absent.
The timing had the feel of something arranged rather than accidental. He could not yet see the full shape of it, but he could see the edge, and the edge had a quality he recognized.
Someone moved while I wasn't watching.
He looked at the coast.
Fine, he thought. I'm watching now.